Collaborative Manufacturing and Design for Heavy Equipment

Collaborative Manufacturing

Our heavy equipment solution helps manufacturers unify global design, engineering and manufacturing teams so they are able to work on the same requirements, models and manufacturing process plans, while having the flexibility to meet local configuration needs.

Improve productivity, reliability and profitability with a collaborative manufacturing solution for heavy equipment

With a rapidly changing global economic climate, capital-intensive manufacturers of heavy equipment face an immediate challenge that is compounded by increasing global competition. Companies also face a growing number of new requirements that new and existing products need to meet, such as emissions, driver fatigue, and noise reduction regulations. On top of all of this, the pressure to drastically reduce the development and manufacturing time it takes to bring heavy equipment to market has grown dramatically.

These combined factors require you to continuously innovate, test and optimize the products that you manufacture and sell. In order to meet these requirements and deliver high-quality, high-performing heavy equipment on-time to customers around the world, your product development process must be connected closely with manufacturing process planning. “Exact Iron” is the Siemens PLM Software perspective on how equipment manufacturers can create this collaborative manufacturing environment so that machines for agriculture, construction, and mining can be produced consistently at multiple manufacturing facilities in established and emerging countries, while meeting unique, local configuration requirements.

Siemens PLM Software’s Collaborative Manufacturing solution enables you to shift the design and development of manufacturing processes upstream so that they can be interlocked with product design and development on an open product lifecycle management (PLM) platform. As a result, you can realize:

Improved offline simulation and optimization of manufacturing planning, which facilitates concurrent development of heavy equipment design and manufacturing processes, re-use of manufacturing knowledge, optimization of production, design of efficient and safe manufacturing human operations, and the best possible asset utilization

Optimized design and manufacturing processes, which streamlines the change management and change disposition process, improves time-to-market and -value, and provides a single source of manufacturing information

Dynamic enterprise manufacturing intelligence connected with product development, which ensures that plant operations, manufacturing processes and asset performance data is available to validate that heavy equipment is being produced as designed and in the most optimal way

Advanced Process and Product Configuration and Variant Management

Having comprehensive access to the right data at the right time has been a longtime challenge for heavy equipment manufacturers. With variant configuration in Teamcenter, you can capitalize on your company’s engineering and manufacturing knowledge.

Visual Process Planning

Being able to efficiently manage multiple variants and ensuring that assembly lines achieve a leveled production flow are ongoing challenges in the heavy equipment industry. By leveraging early lifecycle process information into a wide range of simulation tools, you can evaluate the cycle time of a production line, equalize workload among stations and validate upfront manufacturing processes for the most common mixed-model production scenarios.

Closed-loop Change between Engineering and Manufacturing

Heavy equipment manufacturing requires continuous design improvement for manufacturability to improve time-to-market. With our Collaborative Manufacturing solution, you can gather feedback from all departments, including the shop floor.

Throughput Validation for Mixed Model Production

Virtual validation of throughput to support mixed model production has long been a difficult to goal to reach. Now, prior to an investment, you can use material flow simulation to validate that the target throughput can be reached in a production line under a variety of mixed-model production scenarios.

Intelligent Work Instructions

With Collaborative Manufacturing, engineers, line workers and managers on the shop floor can be a key part of the PLM process. They can access all of the data relevant to their activities, and provide feedback in context of the design and manufacturability of the product.

Our heavy equipment software solutions connect design, engineering and manufacturing so that the product design and development process is globally unified and manufacturing becomes collaborative and strategic. The end result is that companies like yours can flourish in today’s complex business environment.